Sunanda Koning

By webber06-08-2016

One Week About Fashion & Textile by Lilian Driessen

Sunanda Koning (1983) graduated from ArtEZ at the Fashion Design Department in 2010. During her studies she interned at Anna Sui in New York and after graduating at Vlisco in the Netherlands. Since then she has worked as a freelance designer and photographer. She showed her work in a solo exhibition in Kathmandu (Nepal) in 2011. She finished her MA Fashion Design at ArtEZ in 2015. Her graduation collection Kū was nominated for the Frans Molenaar Couture Prize. She was listed as one of Vogue Italia’s Talents of 2015.

Her collection Kū is about transitions, trying to capture this duality within silhouettes – of large shrouds or lush caftans – in fabrics, colors and materials. A celebration of life and death and the stories we leave behind after we pass away.

She makes everything herself. She for example blends a high-quality llama wool into a plastic mix fabric, a ton-sur-ton red lurex merges into a red wool by way of sequins, plastic bottles become deathly flowers embroidered with Czech glass beads and drinking straws. Through a labour of love, by carefully reworking fabrics and trash materials into a new kind of ‘jewelry’, new life, value and meaning are given to the perishable.

She is a photographer as well. She presents her collections/garments and photographic work together as installations. She tells her story by zooming in and out, from 2D to a 3D volume and back again, from a flat to a 3D texture, from nothing to meaningful.